Case study - GREGGS

Greggs has gone through significant change in recn years, transforming from a traditional bakery to a ‘Food on the Go’ retailer and this transformation meant a new in-store system was needed for all 1,800 outlets.

Greggs has gone through significant change in recent years, transforming from a traditional bakery to a ‘Food on the Go’ retailer and this transformation meant a new in-store system was needed for all 1,800 outlets.

Named the Sunrise Programme, the project is part of a five-year significant investment focused on people, processes, and technology but it was essential to ensure Greggs’ staff had the perfect tool/software when serving customers. Greggs selected Keytree as their Systems Integrator to support this major programme, and the partnership has been highly productive with SAP Retail implemented in more than 1,600 shops.

“When going through the selection process, Greggs wanted to make sure they had the right partner to work with, and the biggest driver was the cultural fit,” said James Holmes, Programme Manager for SAP Transformation at Greggs. He added: “The second key driver was making sure Keytree had the technical capability to be able to deliver the functionality Greggs wanted and to ensure we had a solid strategic relationship – and this has built up over the past three years.”

Preparing to make the switch

Converting a large number of outlets to a new technology was a challenge, so Greggs introduced a dedicated Cutover Manager to the programme who initially set up a full dry run of the cutover processes in advance of Go-Live. This approach paid dividends as issues were flagged up and addressed well in advance of the actual Go-Live, meaning that the final cutover into production went without incident.

Tony Taylor, IT and Business Change Director at Greggs was pleased when the first store started using the new system. He said: “Going live with our first shop was a significant milestone as we knew the goal was to upgrade the whole estate and this proved that we had a model we could roll out successfully.”

“The challenge was always the scale and volume of shops we had to do,” added James Holmes. He explained that the target was to cutover 100 outlets per week, and the process was very complicated as the cutover included data extraction from old systems that need translating before loading into SAP and then releasing the solution to the shops. He said: “We start the data migration on Friday, completing a shop software update on Sunday and we then flick the magic switch on a Monday once completing the loading of the legacy store data. It’s big, complicated and there’s a massive amount of timing involved.”

Benefits

Greggs are already reaping the rewards of their investment. Simplified processes, greater visibility of information, plus a procurement system that enables Greggs to buy better and a learning management system that has revolutionised the way that Greggs can roll out training to its 20,000 employees.

The retail solution was rolled out to shops in 2017, and as the next phases of the programme are introduced, the whole supply chain is set to be transformed with the introduction of new processes underpinned by SAP to support Greggs’ vision to be the customers’ favourite for food-on-the-go.